Promo video

So one of the projects that’s been taking up my time over the last little while is the creation of a promotional video for my school. We’re looking for something that’s a little more glamourous than a PowerPoint to get prospective students interested in Carlton. The video I came up with is this:

It was shot in Hi-Def (1080i) on a Sony HandyCam, edited partly in Adobe Premiere CS3 and partly in ArcSoft ShowBiz. Audio was recorded in Audacity, then exported as .wav files and edited and cleaned up in GoldWave 5, a program I hadn’t heard of before this project, but which did a phenomenal job of de-hissing the audio recorded with a handheld computer microphone (i.e. non-balanced, mono). The movie clips were captured using AoA DVD Ripper, which has a handy “movie clip” feature so you don’t have to rip the entire DVD. The DVD version was assembled using Adobe Encore CS3 and turned out quite nicely.

Although everyone who’s seen it has liked it, I’m always slightly disappointed with my media creations. Mostly I think because I have an ideal project in my head, and what I come out with never quite lives up to it. Others, not knowing what I was aiming for, are happy with the final product. This one started off as a much larger project (it was going to be a ~10 minute “day in the life” drama), but was severely scaled back because of time constraints. Maybe next year.

Now, my attention turns to the church, the entity for which the majority of my media creations are made. Our big fundraising push requires a mail-out DVD as part of the promotional package, so that’s next on my agenda. Fortunately, I’ve set the bar a little lower for myself this time – I’m trying to make a clip movie, so that’s easier. I’m going to shoot in Hi-Def again (with the church’s new Canon HV-20) because the footage looks so much better than SD, even after it’s been re-scaled to DVD resolution. Anyways, I have a month to do it, and I’ll probably post it here when it’s done, too.

Ian Hecht is a teacher of French, Science, History and Communication Production Technology at the largest high school in Saskatchewan, Canada. He runs Marturia.net on the side and designs websites and multimedia presentations for non-profit organisations. You can contact Ian by clicking the e-mail link at the top of the page.

The voice acting was supposed to be amateur, which I guess means it had to sound amateur. We wanted student participation, and since we scrapped the drama idea, narration was what was left.

I believe the clips fall under fair use as none of them make up the bulk of the presentation, they’re not being used in a way that endorses what we’re offering, and it’s an educational setting.

Dean, what did you use for chroma-keying the background (I have Adobe Ultra, but I haven’t used it yet)? Those videos look like a lot of fun – if you check back in my archives, you can see some of the stuff I’ve posted in the past….